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Goodies Thoughts - Want a Bluetooth?

As both a Mac and PC
owner, I like to keep up with new innovations for Mac as well as the PC. Since
Apple has developed a long and rather impressive history of introducing and
popularizing some of the best technological innovations such as SCSI, USB and
FireWire, I like to see what they will come up with next. Odds are whatever
innovation they present will soon be adopted into the PC Market. You really have
to give Apple great respect for their consistent innovative thinking and some of
the cleverest commercials ever to be seen on television. Have you seen the one
with the the guy that making faces at the iMac and the iMac making faces back?
That has to be a top 10 favorite of mine right behind the Tabasco sauce
commercial from several years ago with the guy in the Louisiana Bayou eating
pizza and the exploding mosquito. If you want to see the Apple ad go to
http://www.apple.com/hardware/ads/imac_window.html. Anyway, I digress.

Recently, while reading
some of the highlights of Apple's MacWorld Conference in Tokyo last month I came
across the next cool gadget that Apple will be incorporating into its operating
system and hardware, Bluetooth. What an odd and completely non-descriptive name.

So, what is it? Well,
think of it as a wireless USB. The idea is to eliminate all of the cords and
many of the connection problems associated with USB and infrared connections.

With so many devices
using USB now, it can be quite a headache to run all the cords necessary for
your USB devices. While eliminating cords around and under your desk would be
nice, it's definitely not a huge selling point.

The real benefits would
come with handheld devices, your keyboard and your mouse. Imagine connecting,
uploading and downloading from your Palm or PocketPC just by turning on the
device. Imagine your new wireless keyboard or trackball that you can take
anywhere in the room without having to worry about a line of sight to your
infrared device.

Basically what we're
talking about is a scaled down wireless network designed to move small chunks of
data from one device to another. The technology uses many of the same principles
as wireless networking but at a much slower transfer rate of 1 Megabit per
second which is significantly slower than your 10/100 Mbps or 1 Gigabit per
second network cards. Each device that you want to connect via Bluetooth would
need a transceiver attached to it (about $50 right now) which would communicate
with a base unit that could handle up to 8 connections.

Most likely, this
particular innovation won't have nearly the same impact as USB or FireWire but
it will probably become a mainstay with handheld devices. It will give handheld
device users the ability to tap into their computer, download information from
kiosks in stores and malls, or easily interface with fee-based communication
services at places like airports. All this without a cord.

Each year I always enjoy
seeing what new idea Apple has come up with. Some years are definitely better
than others but they always seem to stay ahead of the pack.

Thanks for reading!

Quiz Goodies

Once you have created a
Cascading Style Sheet file, how do you link it to your pages?

Often your best plan of
attack is to first determine what browsers you are targeting. Most developers
will target primarily Internet Explorer and Netscape since they are used by the
vast majority of surfers.

Secondly, test, test and
retest. Be sure to take a look at your pages on as many different targeted
browsers as possible. Testing on different versions of each browser is also
recommended. Some developers will even create a test page that utilizes every
element of their Cascading Style Sheet for testing between browsers. This is
often a good benchmark technique for testing that avoids having to run each and
every page through a series of browser tests.

Q. In HTML how do
I make a link to an Acrobat PDF file so that when a visitor clicks on the link,
the PDF will automatically load in an Acrobat browser window?

A. This is
a question we get quite often. To have an Adobe Acrobat file appear in the
user's browser link to your .pdf file using the <A> tag like this:

The user's browser will
automatically launch Adobe Acrobat and display the file in the browser. Be
careful, though, if they don't have Acrobat installed on their machine the
browser will treat the file as just another download and prompt the user to save
the file. Most developers that use Adobe Acrobat files will provide a link to
the Acrobat Reader free download somewhere on their pages. They will also
caution users that they will need Acrobat Reader installed before they can view
the file.

Q. I know
this must sound silly, but when I put a image on my website, I can see it but
anyone else who comes to my page can't see it!

A.
This is a common problem for those learning HTML. The problem is most likely an
incorrect file path like this:

<IMG SRC="C:\WINDOWS\MyDocuments\filename.GIF">

This points to a file on your local hard drive. You need to upload that file and
change the SRC to reflect where you have uploaded it. Hence the reason why you
can view it, but other people can't.

*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by Alex Newport, one of our HTML Mentors.

News Goodies

"Web Services" is one of the latest
buzz words in Information Technology. So, why are major corporations like IBM,
Sun and Oracle pushing it as the next step in the evolution of the web?

The REL attribute
defines the relationship between the file you are linking and your page. The
TYPE attribute defines the file type which is text (.txt) or Cascading Style
Sheet (.css). Lastly, HREF defines the location of the file that you are
linking.

And Remember This . . .

For those of us in the
United States today is tax day. A day that many of us dread and despise.

While I looked long and
hard for some great little historical tax fact or some other tax tidbit I could
find nothing that was all that interesting. So, instead of a tax fact I thought
we would explore something having to do with money like, say, piggy banks.

Do you know where the
origin of that classic savings institution, the piggy bank, comes from?

The piggy bank has its
origin in 18th century England. In the 18th century, mined metal was very hard
to come by and usually reserved for the aristocratic elite. So, peasants and
commoners typically made everyday household items such as bowls, cups and dishes
out of a natural clay known as "pygg".

Those frugal folks that
desired to save money often stored their wealth in jars or pots know as "pygg
jars". Though the "pygg jar" was not originally molded in the shape of a pig,
the name "pygg jar" became "pygg bank" which did eventually evolve into the
shape of a pig as makers of banks began to design them to resemble their more
common name, "pig bank".

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